Feminists

Stheno

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

I know it was split in mine, and I'm good friends with a female doctor (not GP) who has three kids and a husband who works from home and does the majority of the childcare - if you want to use assumptions from a tiny section of peoples lives to decide if they are up to a job while wilfully ignoring the other 99% of factors that also affects peoples lives then that's your prerogative but it is crackers.

I don't have children but have worked for 14 years in a male dominated environment and a lot of the guys will children took time off to mind their kids, take maternity leave, had to leave work for child related emergencies, it certainly didn't appear that they had no role at all in their childrens care, so I'd agree here Just last week I asked a male colleague if they fancied a pint at the end of the day, but he'd to go and collect his kids from the childminder

Also with the likes of surgeons/other highly paid professions, it's possible that there is arrangement such as nannies/au pairs helping out.

metrovelvet

Thanks. I always like it when a mod calls me crackers. I'll remember that the next time someone gets banned for personalising.

Stheno

metrovelvet wrote: »

Thanks. I always like it when a mod calls me crackers. I'll remember that the next time someone gets banned for personalising.

You weren't being called crackers, the assumptions upon which you make your choices were. There is a difference.

Ickle Magoo

"IT" IS CRACKERS, defies logic, makes no sense, put it in whatever words you prefer - how can I be replying to you and also referring to you as it...talk about looking to be offended. I thought you were setting up a "mod calling me" nonsense with your last post and then thought you'd be above that and I wouldn't have to spell it out.

metrovelvet

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

"IT" IS CRACKERS, defies logic, makes no sense, put it in whatever words you prefer - how can I be replying to you and also referring to you as it...talk about looking to be offended. I thought you were setting up a "mod calling me" nonsense with your last post and then thought you'd be above that and I wouldn't have to spell it out.

It amounts to the same thing, whatever semantic loophole you want to use.

I'm not offended btw, it only matters if I think it's true. I was just pointing it out.

By saying you thought I'd be above it? What does that mean exactly?

Ickle Magoo

No, it's a crackers argument Vs you as a poster are crackers are not the same, ever, with or without semantics...this little sideline, however, is.

Stheno

metrovelvet wrote: »

It amounts to the same thing, whatever semantic loophole you want to use.

Metro, it doesn't, move on.

Note the bold.

/mod hat

sam34

.

Ambersky

I have resisted using statistics because they can be argued and are often boring.
Perhaps though it is unavoidable on the issue of who does the housework and childcare, an area that is so emotional and marked with personal perception.
When it comes ot housework and childcare, all studies seem to come out with women doing more, in general and statistically speaking than their male partners.
Much progress has been made in the area of equality and men are now looking, and rightly so, for their rights as fathers.
Along with rights of course we also have to look at responsibilities .
One of the key phrases of the second wave feminist movement was The Personal Is Political, meaning, among other things that yes it is a womens issue and it does matter who does the housework.
There have been studies done on this worldwide and the division of labour varies but without doing too much searching around I found some information that I think is relevent
From the British office for National Statistics -2001 survey but still of interest and easy to read. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=288

Women still do the majority of the household chores, despite their increased participation in the labour market.

Women spend nearly 3 hours a day on average on housework (excluding shopping and childcare). This compares with the one hour 40 minutes spent by men. Women also spend more time than men looking after children. Men, on the other hand, work or study for an average of nearly 2 hours a day more than women (4 hours 20 minutes a day compared with 2 hours 30 minutes for women).

A longer article that gives some interesting commentry on the division of labour is - Unequal but ‘fair’? Housework and child care in a sample of low- to moderate-income British couples.
4/2010 from the University of Oxford
http://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/pdf/Barnett_Paper_20104.pdf

As previous research has shown, domestic work is highly gendered. Women continue to have disproportionate overall responsibility for domestic labour, including child care and housework, in couples and in aggregate, in many countries; and in addition, women actually carry out more unpaid work in the home than men. But they often see little or no unfairness in this distribution (Sanchez and Kane, 1996; Lennon and Rosenfield, 1994). This „paradox‟ (Braun et al., 2008) motivates much research (for example, Grote, Naylor and Clark, 2002; Braun et al., 2008; Baxter, 2000).
.......
qualitative re-search in Sweden finds that men and women avoid explanations for the ways they di-vide housework that could be seen to indicate gender inequality, referring instead to fi-nancial rationales, personal qualities or special circumstances (Ahlberg, Roman and Duncan, 2008; Björnberg and Kollind, 2005; Nordenmark and Nyman, 2003).
.......
However, while 69 per cent of British couples said that the responsibility for housework should be shared, only 34 per cent reported that it was shared
.....
women with more alternatives to their marriage (paid work, income) perceive unequal divisions of domestic tasks as unfair, whereas women with fewer alternatives report greater acceptance of the situation. Nordenmark and Nyman (2003)
....
As in previous research findings, men often reported or were reported as „helping‟ with housework, by „giv[ing] her a hand‟
...
Gender relations also operate in the field of child care. British attitudes have „improved‟ in terms of views about gender roles; but attitudes towards working mothers are less progressive (Crompton, Brockmann and Wiggins, 2003). There is more literature on the division of housework than child care in couples..... It may be important, for example, to distinguish „child care‟ from „spending time with children‟;
.. In our sample of couples, there was some differentiation, in discussion, between who performed child care itself, and who took responsibility for it
.. having children causes more housework (Craig, 2006); and performing housework can interfere with perform-ing child care and vice versa
... In the United States, men with egalitarian gender attitudes decrease their hours of paid work on becoming fathers, while men with traditional gender attitudes increase them
... It is questionable how often childcare decisions are made consciously, or how often these decisions, where made, are explicitly negotiated.
in comparison with child care, housework is virtually ab-sent from UK policy discourse. Social policy has kept the domestic division of labour at home (Oakley, 2002). Yet,....
Policies that offer genu-ine choice for parents‟ work-family balance are difficult to achieve (Lewis, 2007). And Cooke and Baxter (2010: 529) argue that neither the market nor policy has managed to close the gender gap in (paid or) unpaid work across developed countries.

I would also like to say that there has been an observation that when a profession is feminised the status of that profession and the salary allocated to it is lowered.
I believe this happened with the medical profession in Russia where female doctors outnumbered males.
So if males do a job it is important and difficult and deserving of a higher salary and if women do it well the status goes down.
Any attempts to correct the gender balance when women begin to outpace men in a particular profession should be careful not to claim that this is because of any perceived or designated failings of women as a gender.

For the majority of time of their existence many professions were open to males only.
Remember women only started voting in 1928. In Ireland, there only 91 women at university in 1901, only 5% of married women had jobs outside the home in 1966 & only in 1973 was the ban on married women working in the Irish Public Service lifted.
It is interesting to see the reaction to women catching up and outpacing men in the competition for entry to medicine.
I would like to see equal attention, commentary and urgency being given to equalising the gender balance in politics for instance. With only 14 percent of our elected representatives female, thats not a little off balance or beginning to be off balance or even a new issue.

MadameCholet

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Not dragging a thread off-topic by arguing with moderator instruction is a basic tenet of Boards in every forum. If you have any questions regarding moderator instruction then you PM the mod in question and request clarification that way, you can find the charter for this forum here and a guide to general Boards posting rules and etiquette here.

Lazy generalisations, particularly ones that start "Women...." or "Men...." and seek to speak for everyone in that gender just serves to inflame and annoy - giving a personal opinion is one thing, making sweeping statement about an entire gender is never going to be true and thus is completely pointless.

_________________

The problem with this type of moderation is that I didn't make 'lazy generalisations'. When I say men enjoy a sense of entitlement I mean that collectively their sex does enjoy a sense a privileged position in society. This is not to zone in on individuals who DO or don't have privileged lives, or senses of entitlement. It is a statement of fact that collectively men are in a better position.

A moderator who can't understand the arguments isn't really fit to breeze in with a lazy "don't make generalisations". And then when pressed, couldn't even identify the alleged "generalisations". This is the sort of 'moderation' which actually makes a total mockery of Moderation.

What does moderation in this context mean? That the argument must stay within the realms of what the moderator himself has the ability to grasp and understand? So it would seem!

And because I'm a newbie to boards I will be smacked back down. I may be a newbie to boards but I'm not a newbie to the internet or to em, life. So I can recognise a total farce when I see one.

Moderation my AR*e as Jim Royle might say.

I do hope I haven't offended the delicate sensibilities of the moderator. Perhaps he/she might like to be a bit less lazy next time he/she wades cheerfully into the middle of something he/she has clearly not read properly.

Morag

oh my someone really doesn't understand the rules around here.

liah

It's like a car crash - I want to, but I just can't look away. :eek:

MadameCholet

Sharrow wrote: »

oh my someone really doesn't understand the rules around here.

What are the rules then? Totalitarian regime with random keyboard warrior despots at the helm?:cool:

I suppose I'll be banned in about two minutes, but fekk it, if the moderators can't understand the difference between "making a generalisation" and referring to one sex or the other collectively, and then you can't even point out their error......!! :eek: then I'd wonder if it was a club worth being in anyway.

It seems like an interesting place with lots of very informed posters. As an outsider, first impressions are that moderators who wade in too quickly without understanding the argument and labelling other posters' opinions 'crackers' might not be "adding anything constructive".

If I can't post again it's because I'm banned. Nice knowing yall briefly.

metrovelvet

Cut and copy your post, then delete it and take it to feedback.

liah

The rules are: don't be a dick. Read the charter. Boards is a kind dictatorship but a dictatorship nonetheless (and with good reason). And don't make generalizations.

Oh, and: don't ever, EVER, question moderator decisions on-thread, only in PM.

Whether you agree or not is semantics. When you say "men are," most people are going to read it as "all men are." Trust me, I know. I've been there, and had this conversation you're having (and very much agree with the principle of what you're saying, for the record). Then I realized I was being a dick, and have started to try and be more aware of how I word things. Sometimes it works, sometimes I fail miserably, but I try. :pac:

That's the only solution here. The mods have a tough job and they're only acting out of experience - through many thousands of arguments on boards we've realized that "men are" and "women are" statements cause trouble. A LOT of it. So we don't do that anymore. Is it really that big a deal?

rainbow kirby

MadameCholet banned for 7 days - if you have a problem with a moderator decision please take it to PMs, do not derail the thread.

Morag

It is good that fathers are now in many cases taking on more of the responsibility and hands on care of their children. My Dad did but that was 35 years ago when he shocked my grandmother and my aunts by changing my nappy(terry cloth, sharp nappy pin and all) while my mother was sick instead of handing me over to one of them.

There are Dad's who know how hard it is to be at home with little ones and do give their partners a break and give a hand with the house work instead of expecting it all to just get done, but as wonderful as these men are, I don't think they are in the majority yet.

metrovelvet

Its the LL. Shouldnt it be dont be a pussy?

Maple

metrovelvet wrote: »

Its the LL. Shouldnt it be dont be a pussy?

Let's not derail the thread any further please.

Maple

metrovelvet

Sorry Maple I take it back, plus I made a sweeping generalisation in assuming one that its only women posting here and two that all women have vaginas. My mistake. I withdraw it.

seenitall

Sharrow wrote: »

It is good that fathers are now in many cases taking on more of the responsibility and hands on care of their children. My Dad did but that was 15 years ago when he shocked my grandmother and my aunts by changing my nappy(terry cloth, sharp nappy pin and all) while my mother was sick instead of handing me over to one of them.

There are Dad's who know how hard it is to be at home with little ones and do give their partners a break and give a hand with the house work instead of expecting it all to just get done, but as wonderful as these men are, I don't think they are in the majority yet.

Wow :eek: Sharrow, you write so much sense for someone so young, I woulda never guessed this!! (Or maybe I'm getting to the stage where I don't even remember my own teenage state of mind... )

Maple

metrovelvet wrote: »

Sorry Maple I take it back, plus I made a sweeping generalisation in assuming one that its only women posting here and two that all women have vaginas. My mistake. I withdraw it.

Banned for two weeks for persistent derailing of the thread.

Maple

Micky Dolenz

I have to say in all my years I have never meet a feminist and I grew up in a female dominated house, where strong women were order of the day.

Is the raging bra burning feminist just a myth?

I do however support all and any movement dedicated to getting rid of bras, silly contraptions.

Ickle Magoo

How do you know they weren't feminists? Barring the AH type bra burning response, I mean...

Micky Dolenz

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

How do you know they weren't feminists? Barring the AH type bra burning response, I mean...

I mean the ultra hardcore stereotype feminists. I am sure every women is feminist to a degree but I have never walked away from a conversation with a woman and thought, "fcuk me, what a feminist" after they have shoved their beliefs down my throat.

coffee_cake

Micky Dolenz wrote: »

I mean the ultra hardcore stereotype feminists. I am sure every women is feminist to a degree but I have never walked away from a conversation with a woman and thought, "fcuk me, what a feminist" after they have shoved their beliefs down my throat.

s/feminist/rude person/ ??

Ickle Magoo

So they may well have been feminists, just not the ultra-hardcore variety? I've never met one of those stereotypical hardcore, ram it down the throat type feminists either. I have a hunch they are a titchy-tiny minority blown up to mythical proportions and used to bash the very notion or title of feminist/m...

Micky Dolenz

bluewolf wrote: »

s/feminist/rude person/ ??

No, I didn't mean that at all.

*Slowly backs away from thread, trying not to make eye contact*

TaraFoxglove

Micky Dolenz wrote: »

I do however support all and any movement dedicated to getting rid of bras, silly contraptions.

No Micky, think of the saggage!

Ickle Magoo

Relax, Mr D, I think blue is pointing out you could just as easily label them rude as feminist as it's their rudeness/ignorance driving the ferocity of their feminism towards another person, rather than the other way around.